Abstract
Public health (pubblica sanità) in Renaissance Milan encompassed ideas as well as practices related to how to maintain the health of the metaphorical (as well as physical) body of the community, at epidemic as well as non-epidemic times. Indeed, Milan’s Health Board, founded in 1534, did not deal exclusively with the containment measures aimed to limit epidemics, but also with various, more mundane and sometimes environmental questions such as the management of waters, the cultivation of rice, air salubrity, the disposal of organic waste and the cleanness of streets and dwellings, with the overall goal to preserve public good (bene pubblico) and maintain the integrity of the community. By using some untapped early modern (XVI-XVII centuries) archival sources related to the management of environmental threats, this paper will highlight how the practice of public health was the result of complex and somehow unexpected processes of negotiation between several social constituencies (and cultures of knowledge), such as physicians, engineers, landowners, farmers, religious orders, institutions and city dwellers.
Lavinia Maddaluno is a postdoc at the Department of Humanities at Ca' Foscari, working on the ERC project The Water Cultures of Italy 1500-1900 (PI: Professor David Gentilcore). She is a historian (PhD, Cambridge University) and historian of Science (MPhil, Cambridge), and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome, a Warburg/I Tatti Fellowship, and a Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI. Her central research question concerns the role of scientific knowledge production in the realization of ideas of wealth, state, and society in Europe in the Enlightenment. She is currently revising the manuscript of her first monograph, Science and political economy in enlightened Milan (1760s-1815), and expanding her research interests to cover the late Italian Renaissance, in particular the intersection between medical knowledge and models of management of natural resources in the Seicento.
